Teaching in the First Three Weeks

I really didn’t know how to start a semester like nothing had changed. It didn’t seem fair to my students either, and we were all dying to talk and to sort out what was happening with travel bans and protests and a country divided.

I decided to start with Ayad Akhtar’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play Disgraced. We read the play from two distinctly different perspectives. We used Charles Baxter’s book Burning Down the House to consider the question of deniability, examining his complaint about too many stories in our culture where there is no accountability, where no one takes responsibility for their actions, when in fact characters rarely act, but are rather victims of their own psychological profiles. Baxter begins by talking about RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon—how appropriate. It’s a book written in the passive voice of “mistakes were made” but no one is accountable for making them. Baxter is fretting that our literature is beginning to look too much like our politics. In fiction and the socio-political sphere, Baxter prefers flawed characters who own their actions and feel the consequences, where truths and lies can be distinguished and where actors in their own stories can’t cry victimhood. He believes fiction must stand in opposition to a political culture of deniability.

My students come to class traumatized by each day’s news. They are theatre students, astute at tracking stories and sorting truth and lies inside of character portrayals.

Amir, the protagonist in Disgraced, illustrates Baxter’s preferred kind of fictional character. He is an “I protagonist” who makes decisions, acts, and then experiences the consequences of those actions. He makes a terrible mistake, one that will cost him his family and his career. It’s not that he’s evil, it’s that he’s flawed, and there’s no deniability, there is no court of law to play out his guilt or innocence. He beats his wife, and he loses everything. This is a play of action and accountability, not a play of deniability where everyone claims victimhood.

This feels like a breath of fresh air in a political climate of gaslighting where everyone is doing exactly that, especially a lying administration that constantly denies their own lies and claims the press is victimizing them by misunderstanding them. This is a culture of crazy-making that neither I nor my students can comprehend. Our best hope of making sense of what’s happening is to sit together in the classroom and try to parse other stories to make sense of the one unfolding in our country. Amir seems human—smart, a good lover, ambitious, and angry. We can imagine all kinds of psychological profiles for Amir’s actions but it’s his actions that the play forces us to deal with. And it’s painful to watch and every character, not just Amir, seems woefully flawed, but it’s Amir who ultimately crosses the line of no return. These are the kinds of characters that make for good drama.

The other way we approached Disgraced was through the lens of how Muslims have been portrayed in our culture, most recently with an illegal ban targeting Muslims for their religious views. What does it mean for Disgraced to present a protagonist who disavows his Muslim identity in a political climate when so many Americans are clamoring for characters who do exactly that? HowlRound has published several articles on this phenomenon and the incredible frustration in the Muslim creative community over the success of this play as the play that stands in for representing a community woefully absent from our stages. Many argue that this is a play that harms the Muslim community and is primarily for white people who are comfortable with what they perceive as the play’s racism. We also read an interview with the playwright who talks about the play from his perspective.

My students and I didn’t resolve the tensions this play represents but we were able to read them inside the current political climate, both admiring the play and questioning it simultaneously—finding nuance in our discussions together as a kind of antidote to the impossible polarization that is absenting complex dialogue from our political milieu.

Cobb Hall, University of Chicago. Photo by Tom Rossiter.

For those of us teaching theatre this semester, it’s an unresolvable conundrum to figure out how to proceed. Our students need to learn about the profession; we have spent countless hours preparing syllabi that we bring to the classroom with great confidence, but suddenly most of us are looking at our lesson plans and wondering do they actually matter in a historical moment when our country is upside down. Everything can feel mundane right now if it isn’t directly tied to action toward the current political moment. When the country is living with the reality of a White House and a country in complete disarray, how can our students not feel afraid and need the space of the classroom to make sense of that fear?

My students come to class traumatized by each day’s news. They are theatre students, astute at tracking stories and sorting truth and lies inside of character portrayals. Reading Disgraced together along with Baxter and Helen Cixous’s Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing gave us some breathing space in the impossible first three weeks of the Trump administration.

Cixous writes about our dream life, the space outside our conscious selves where we find our creative life, where the impossible is possible, where stories live.

Writing is not arriving; most of the time it’s not arriving, one must go on foot with the body …One must walk as far as the night. One’s own night. Walking through the self toward the dark.

And as a class we talked together about what it means to walk toward the dark as artists, how to live in that dark and not die of terror? How to survive that sense that we all feel targeted by the dark night of this political moment and yet we must not die of fright?

Yet, how does exploring our imaginations even matter right now? And is this enough? Alex Ross in his excellent New Yorkeressay “Making Art in the Time of Rage” asks, “What is the point of making beautiful things, or of cherishing the beauty of the past when ugliness runs rampant?” In other words, how can we go on as artists and teachers of theatre in the classroom right now as though the world isn’t falling apart? Is it enough to go on?

To make possible a future that will never replicate this political present, we must all engage histories that don’t contain us, and this is particularly true for those of us sitting in primarily white classrooms.

Our poets are helpful now. They use art to exhort us to answer these questions of art versus action through their very acts of creation.

what would it mean to livein a city whose people were changingeach other’s despair into hope?you yourself must change it.what would it feel like to knowyour country was changing?you yourself must change it.although your life felt arduousnew and unmapped and strangewhat would it mean to stand on the firstpage of the end of despair?“Dreams Before Waking,” Adrienne Rich

Rich makes me think that we are responsible for cultivating the imaginations of our poets right now. There’s a single line in Teju Cole’s brilliant essay “Black Body” where he takes momentary issue with James Baldwin when he says, “I can oppose white supremacy, and still rejoice in Gothic Architecture.” I’m taking it out of context, as he means to say to Baldwin that he can appreciate art that does not contain his history as a black man. But there is something that struck me in reading that essay over and over about the incredible necessity for our students right now to be steeped in histories and stories that are not their own; that to make possible a future that will never replicate this political present, we must all engage histories that don’t contain us, and this is particularly true for those of us sitting in primarily white classrooms. Cixous says, “But the most difficult thing for human beings to do is to think ahead, to put ourselves in the shoes of those we have not yet been.” This seems like the work of teaching right now, to find every size of shoe in our classroom and find ways for our students to walk in them with discomfort and unknowing and curiosity—for our students to create in those very shoes that do not fit.

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